I hope that you are not too hard on yourself for whatever you find lacking in the original piece, or for any critiques inspired by this one. Megan Stielstra wrote once that "to essay" means only "to attempt," and we're all better for having access to these tools for speaking about gender and being able to continue to refine them. I look forward to seeing what emerges from this work, which has already enriched my own writing & understanding so much. I hope to see writers (including yourself) tackle how racialization interacts with all of this, want to explore the ways in which these dynamics are contextual and mutable a bit more, and think I'll probably have a fair amount more to say about how the boundaries of manhood are policed for queer men, too. Thank you for writing this!!
really appreciate the rehash of the previous iteration of this theory. this is generally a lot easier for me to follow along. i really dig the comparisons of gender to class, or rather gender as a class, and subaltern being the necessary underclass, like how capitalism requires an unemployed populous to function, in order to threaten the working class. there are of course bones i have to pick with some things, like the qualifications of who gets put into subaltern, but i think talia bhatt's "understanding transmisogyny, part four: penetrability" fills in some of the blanks there. reading her work in tandem with yours gives me a great avenue to finally put words to what i see and feel about this whole gender thing. keep it up!
I was excited to read this. I’m glad to see you’ve expanded and refined your theory, and I hope in the spirit of discourse you appreciate less polished critique from a very different terrain of analysis. The expansion adds some interesting insights at the level of relational positioning, although I believe the same core issues remain. To put it plainly, the ontological map you propose isn’t appropriate, as you’re ascribing legibility to a scattered, increasingly distorted field, straddling both the symbolic and material realities of gender in a way I’m compelled to problematize and ramble on about tirelessly. Because what we’re dealing with is not only material struggle but the product of capital’s semiotic hegemony. Gender is organized around a singular subject-form, a hegemonic “I,” and the collapsed or distorted subjectivities that gather around it. The system does not simply produce distinct classes, it produces visibility, recognition, formatting. Subalternization is not just a punishment as you emphasize, nor is it defined by invisibility or illegibility as I think you imply. What defines it, if anything, is its hyperlegibility and punishment as failure, in contradiction with its condition as a visible content category. She is folded into a different kind of production entirely, distinct from the Not Power: the production of symbolic surplus. Gender functions not only as a class system, but as a sign system or semiotic field. It produces surplus labor and symbolic excess at the same time. The woman as void, the theyfab as glitch, the faggot as caricature: They mark the exhaustion of gender’s symbolic economy, which has begun to recurse, break down, and consume itself. This kind of collapse mirrors what happens when the superstructure can no longer meaningfully map onto the base. Gramsci called this a crisis of hegemony: when ideology fails to explain the conditions of life, and symbolic authority begins to unravel. Gender is in such a state of crisis. Transfeminine life doesn’t merely symbolize this contradiction, the tranny exposes it. The tranny IS the contradiction, and she is formatted into spectacle, because capital doesn’t erase symbolic failure. It monetizes it. The transfeminine isn’t hidden, she’s fed into TikTok, fashion, Twitter discourse, IKEA sharks. “Shemale” becomes both slur and porn category. She is actually made hypervisible, not as a subject or just as a warning, but as entertainment and a consumer category. And this is the precondition by which liberalism markets gendered tolerance, visibility, exploration, and so-called autonomy. This is the trans feminine ontology: a crisis managed through aesthetics, not being excluded from the gender economy but being excessively folded into it. That is what makes the queer positioning unique and distinct. In this view, I continue to suspect this isn’t a ternary system, compelling as that seems, but a monadic one (though I admit to disagreeing with you fundamentally about what gender ontologically is here.) To reiterate a critique I made before, there is one sovereign subject-form that defines the semiotic field of gender. The supposed “three” positions are not equally constituted gender-classes but are relational distortions, failures, or reactions to that central gendered subject. What appears as a ternary is, in fact, a unified symbolic machine, a singular symbolic recursion organized around a lone sovereign subject: a Monogender. Not “man” in the biological sense, but abstract Man-as-subject, the one who names, acts, formats, and owns, and the one through whom coherence, recognition, and desire are distributed. Everyone else is positioned in relation to him: as object, as failure, as symbolic residue. Power is just proximity to this subject. Not-Power is tolerable otherness, what he comfortably owns and regulates. Subaltern is the system’s collapsed output, glitch, spectacle, and the expulsion formatted as content. What we are left with is not a grid of three genders or genders-as-classes. It is a bourgeois, monogendered field with orbiting distortions, the scattered breakdowns of gender’s semiotic order altogether.
When I was reading the essay I couldn't get out of my head homeless men, mentally ill men, pacifist man, dysfunctional war veteran man. Men who have failed at what is expected of men ideologically, othered men but differently from gay men or transgender. Do they fit within subaltern, or are they glitches/failiures/etc?
I have been thinking similarly to what you say about gender about whiteness, there is the ideal white and everyone is positioned in relation to that. It occurred to me that white homeless man is a failed white man, as he does not live up to what is expected of him ideologically. I suppose a white homeless man is also a subaltern according to the theory in this essay, I don't know, I have not thoroughly thought through it yet, but I thought I would throw this out there as something to think about.
If we conceptualize this as a scattered field with a proximal center, and all other identities orbiting the Monogendered center of gravity, then their relationship in terms of gender is closer to that center relative to women or queers. That said, failure within the masculine symbolic does not necessarily place someone outside of it. A white homeless man is still formatted as a man. His social “failure” might make him pitiable, criminalized, or ignored, but not feminized. In fact, that failure can reinforce the symbolic structure by providing contrast: a failed man is still a man within the moral architecture of gender, functioning as a cautionary tale of failing to live up to masculinity rather than a counterexample. What differentiates the subaltern, I feel, isn’t only marginalization, but symbolic illegibility or contradiction within the system’s own terms, rendering its concentric field of orbit much further away. The subaltern as a collapsed subject doesn’t just fail to live up to the standard. Their profile destabilizes or threatens its coherence. This is why transfeminine people often occupy the most violently policed position, not simply failed men or failed women, but a symbolic glitch in the formatting apparatus.
I think your parallel to whiteness is great. White failure is still whiteness. It may fall short of bourgeois norms, but whiteness remains legible and structurally protected even in failure. Similarly, manhood is not evacuated by dysfunction, it’s often amplified through its own crisis.
how honored am I to have even been a little bit part of the conversations that happened to make this essay real. you continue to put into words what I know but fail to describe myself - and I am so grateful for it! I can't wait to see what comes next.
oops, forgot this is my throwaway account. it's eight!
I really loved this and gave me a lot to think about, but I really need to say now that I disagree with your answer to the why of the transphobic murder.
The system require the class, not anyone member. It doesn't matter how many are killed because new members would always appears since, as long as the structure exist, some people will fail to maintain it and would be punish for it. So the killing is a part of maintaining the system, the ultimate punishment to a given individual.
Not all of this strikes a chord in me as reflecting an intuitive understanding, but the parts that ring true resonate powerfully. This makes visceral sense in a way that Bodies That Matter gets at in a disatisftingly empty way. There is mass, momentum in this perspective. I particularly appreciate the reproductive force that is sustained by what we might feel is subversive. Power is fed by layers of digestive processes; an ecosystem, not a system of ideology that can be simply adjusted in course. Veblen articulates social forces in biological sensibility in a way that feels akin to this work.
> Rather, it feels more like a “remake” to me than a direct sequel – a “Rebuild of Evangelion” more than it is an “Iron Man 2.”
Genuinely made me chuckle. This is minor in the grand scheme of things, but I really appreciate the humor you injected into the piece. It's nerdy without being smarmy - a rarity in this day and age - and helps digest the more serious part of the text. It's a show of good craft!
Anyway, this theory is something I think has been desperately needed in queer/gender theory for aaaages. There have been attempts at similar concepts like how I saw some people on tumblr talk about "faggot as a gender" years ago, and even acknowledgement that the already existing frameworks were ill fit to serve us, like how one of tumblr user baeddel's retrospectives on the clique of the same name mentioned that they felt like they had to fit their theory into a "privilege-oppression" framework even while realizing the framework was insufficiency, but this is the first time I've seen it laid out in a longform text rather than just mentioned off-hand in a tumblr post. I think this lack is a contributing factor to what people deem "trans infighting". The main culprit is the transmisogyny, obviously, but it seems to me that even when different groups of trans people are actually trying to have good faith discussion, there's an invisible barrier preventing us from truly reaching each other. We're always trying to prove we're "really" whatever gender say we are by pointing out how alike we are to our cis counterparts, but the actual transness, the liminality of gender within which many of us operate, is forced to go unacknowledged, lest anyone get the ides trans women/men are "actually" men/women respectively, and it stifles us! Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes it feels like it's by design TBH!
I'm curious BTW, since you have some experience with plurality/systemhood, what do you think about how that experience intersects with gender? I know it's a bit beyond the scope of this article, but as someone who recently realized they're plural, I often wonder about this. It's quite common for systems to have a variety of genders among their members - it's certainly true for ours - and I always take cues from them about how they want to be referred as, but I struggle to even conceptualize how this fits into the wider structure of gender. Well, the easy answer is that it doesn't and this is due to ableism in society preventing us from even being fully acknowledged as existing beings lol, but surely not every system or even individual alter is part od the subaltern class, right? It just feels far too simplistic!
“surely not every system or even individual alter is part of the subaltern class, right?” I think this is such an interesting question! I’m a fan of the original gender ternary piece and also loved this update, but it’s still possible I’m misunderstanding, so bear with me. When the term faggotization was used in the original piece, I remember the author making effort to point out that the class one finds oneself in is imposed from the larger social system, and therefore must be legible to power, not to oneself. That when thinking about locating gender class, a possible heuristic might be to imagine how the most bigoted dude at a bar might categorize you. So does power interact with you differently based on the presenting alter? (Pardon if my terminology is incorrect— I know two systems but I’m new to the concept) Are you Subalternized by power? Can you access Not Power? Can you access Power? How does power that consistently interacts with different alters categorize you? Anyone reading, are these questions along the right lines or am I missing something?
The original was extremely enlightening to me and when paired with this does a really good job of explaining both what these ideas are and why they are so important.
I do feel with writing this theoretical and in conversation with other works really lacks references. Especially in areas like the material base where you defer to the work of others to make the case.
This is an incredible work and I absolutely loved reading it. I hope you don't mind if I use your own work as a foundational piece for a personal research project on Marxism & Queerness and just wanted to thank you for putting this piece out there.
I really like this theory of subalternisation, I've been thinking about it a lot, and as a non passing trans man I notice it in my own life. I like how it divorces gender identity from gender class, and how it shows how gender is stamped on you, it is not something you get to choose, nor is it something you can make room for your identity within. For a long time there was only the radfem approach, female and male as a class, I found it useful for a while but when applied to my experience as an out trans man, and also my longer experience before that as an autistic woman, I found it to be inadequate and broken.
Particularly as an autistic woman I found sex as class to be unsuitable, as my inability to conform to accepted femininity, in appearance and in behaviour, caused me to be what I now recognised as 'subalternised'. Even when i did my best to fit in with cis womanhood I felt that I was a lower class to my cis neurotypical girl classmates. I was often subjugated in different classes despite my grades, different areas of the school during lunch time, put in the 'mixed group' in sports (instead of girl or boy groups, we all had to stay in our respective groups, and one time when the girls were asked to leave and I didn't no one said anything as I was not considered to be a girl). A lot of this was due to my masculinity, but regardless of whether I successfully masked it or not I still ended up there.
I felt 'not like other girls', which is something I see many autistic girls consider themselves, particularly teenagers, a time when gender is being stamped onto you more than ever. This is all why I've had such a big problem with the NLOG discourse, and have learned to stay away from it, as it does not take into account autistic experience. Instead of superior we often feel inferior, and are treated as inferior to non autistic women, and often feel like 'failed women', something I often see autistic women call themselves. It is not uncommon to wish for the grace neurotypical cis women have, as we are aware that it would protect us massively.
Yes there is ableism here, and I think being disabled can be considered a gender failiure, but with autism we are unable to perform gender correctly across the board regardless of whether we are feminine or not. I was not feminine so I got a lot of abuse particularly during my education and still now in my 30s suffer from the trauma of it. However remembering my neurodivergent cis girl feminine school mates, I know that within the school we were often classed together, and I as a more extreme version of them. This would manifest in place, as we were often informally subjugated to certain rooms during lunch break, unable to go out of these unless it was to go to class because the abuse would be constant. There was a strange hierarchy in this girl group, and I and another (who I hear later identified butch) were at the bottom, and the more feminine presenting and better masking above us. We were often bullied by the group, I imagine this was the groups attempt at alieving their subalternisation by further doing the same to us. Some really had aspirations to a non autistic status that they could never achieve. It crushed them to say the least.
The abuse often centered on our role as woman (or i think better yet, Not Power, in sevice of Power), we were dirty, clumbsy, we were notorious lesbians (and 2 of the girls discovered they were). For me as a masculine person, exhibiting many 'boy' behaviours, I was not just a lesbian but an 'animal fucker', someone with sexual interest that don't involve humans, who lives as an animal (despite not exhibiting animal like behaviour, like some autistic people do) Thing-ized and dehumanised. I was even accused of being a trans woman, something I found strangely affirming as a teenager. Still these categories, lesbian, trans woman, animal, all dehumanised, not fitting into gender class. I am white, but I have a theory of failed whiteness, and I think to be animal-ized, 'savage', fits into that. I think there is an interesting intersection here, but I won't go into it now.
Another thing, I saw Dr Devon Price talk of gender class as unconscious, as mechanised. This makes sense to me. I have acquaintances who are supportive of trans people, yet I can see that they do not view me as man, and not because they do not consciously try. There is an awkwardness there. I see it in the way they talk to cis men in comparison to the way they talk to me. I'm not overly offended by it, because I recognise that this is something that I do too, and I suppose I can not choose to gender a person the way they wish to be gendered in terms of gender class, just as I can not choose how I am gendered.
Anyway, here are some thoughts I had in regards to your essay that I thought I would post, they're not very organised but perhaps your theory can help clarify them for me, or open some new paths.
How attached to gender class is aesthetics/visual symbols? Can we break this down to underlying ideology?
Are men who deny war subalternised? Pacifists forced to wear white feathers, what could be interpretted as a feminine symbol. An otherwise conventional looking man, and a feminine symbol is added to him where there is none. Is this subalternisation? Aesthetic symbol a tool for gender class?
Women who do not serve men, lesbians, are they subalternised? If they inhabit 'not power' through their visual presentation (a hollywoodized assimilated lesbian), but do not show interest in men are they subalternised, or is there disobeying of the ideological principles of gender class enough? I'm sure you get a lot of these types of questions so I apologise if this is a repetitive experience!
I will return to this and read it more in-depth later -- I'm at work right now, oops -- but I hope it is okay if I reference this/build upon it as I'm working on my own things related to gay trans men. I am always excited by explicitly Marxist analyses of gender, so I am happy to see that you built further upon your previous essay.
Hey I love this, it felt as intuitive to me as a reader as the first time I learned about the basic Marxist theory of economic class. A liberal understanding of the issue that treats the issue as one of power with a bunch of tiny little exceptions that make the whole thing impossible to fully understand instantly collapsing into legibility by reframing the terms of the class struggle. I love dialectical materialism!
I think something that could be expounded on in the future (and something I will certainly be thinking a lot about) is the idea of class assignment. It seems like a big difference between traditional understandings of class vs. gender-class is that a person's gender-class position seems socially defined whereas a person's economic class is defined, more simply, by possession of capital. No social understanding of a member of the bourgeoisie can remove their capital and therefore their class position, but can a trans man in P be removed from their class position by something as simple and commonplace as a misgendering? In other words: how do we know what gender-class somebody is in?
I can’t stop thinking about this since I read it. I keep wanting to simplify or just print it out as is as little physical books/zines & leave it in public places because I want everyone to read it. I feel that most people bristle at the idea that gender is something done to you instead of something you intrinsically are but that’s a necessary hurdle to overcome for capitalism to end & be replaced by something better. It just made so much sense immediately that it feels like a call to action.
I love this! I'm writing my own gender article up (mostly to make sure everything Sticks in my head) and kept on circling around and around on one question (which might be a stupid one, sorry): is this Base or Superstructure? It seems like it is mostly the latter as it is concerned for sorting based on one's individual, ideological/physical/protocol failings of gender rather than on any relations of production or labor. I know Section 3 addressed it somewhat (at least, in regards to gender-class and the nuclear family. However, unless I'm reading it wrong, even that section seems to focus on how gender-class shapes the material rather (superstructure into base) rather than the inverse.
Again, sorry if this is a stupid question. I love this piece a ton!!
I hope that you are not too hard on yourself for whatever you find lacking in the original piece, or for any critiques inspired by this one. Megan Stielstra wrote once that "to essay" means only "to attempt," and we're all better for having access to these tools for speaking about gender and being able to continue to refine them. I look forward to seeing what emerges from this work, which has already enriched my own writing & understanding so much. I hope to see writers (including yourself) tackle how racialization interacts with all of this, want to explore the ways in which these dynamics are contextual and mutable a bit more, and think I'll probably have a fair amount more to say about how the boundaries of manhood are policed for queer men, too. Thank you for writing this!!
Thank you so much for your encouraging words! I appreciate it dearly.
really appreciate the rehash of the previous iteration of this theory. this is generally a lot easier for me to follow along. i really dig the comparisons of gender to class, or rather gender as a class, and subaltern being the necessary underclass, like how capitalism requires an unemployed populous to function, in order to threaten the working class. there are of course bones i have to pick with some things, like the qualifications of who gets put into subaltern, but i think talia bhatt's "understanding transmisogyny, part four: penetrability" fills in some of the blanks there. reading her work in tandem with yours gives me a great avenue to finally put words to what i see and feel about this whole gender thing. keep it up!
I was excited to read this. I’m glad to see you’ve expanded and refined your theory, and I hope in the spirit of discourse you appreciate less polished critique from a very different terrain of analysis. The expansion adds some interesting insights at the level of relational positioning, although I believe the same core issues remain. To put it plainly, the ontological map you propose isn’t appropriate, as you’re ascribing legibility to a scattered, increasingly distorted field, straddling both the symbolic and material realities of gender in a way I’m compelled to problematize and ramble on about tirelessly. Because what we’re dealing with is not only material struggle but the product of capital’s semiotic hegemony. Gender is organized around a singular subject-form, a hegemonic “I,” and the collapsed or distorted subjectivities that gather around it. The system does not simply produce distinct classes, it produces visibility, recognition, formatting. Subalternization is not just a punishment as you emphasize, nor is it defined by invisibility or illegibility as I think you imply. What defines it, if anything, is its hyperlegibility and punishment as failure, in contradiction with its condition as a visible content category. She is folded into a different kind of production entirely, distinct from the Not Power: the production of symbolic surplus. Gender functions not only as a class system, but as a sign system or semiotic field. It produces surplus labor and symbolic excess at the same time. The woman as void, the theyfab as glitch, the faggot as caricature: They mark the exhaustion of gender’s symbolic economy, which has begun to recurse, break down, and consume itself. This kind of collapse mirrors what happens when the superstructure can no longer meaningfully map onto the base. Gramsci called this a crisis of hegemony: when ideology fails to explain the conditions of life, and symbolic authority begins to unravel. Gender is in such a state of crisis. Transfeminine life doesn’t merely symbolize this contradiction, the tranny exposes it. The tranny IS the contradiction, and she is formatted into spectacle, because capital doesn’t erase symbolic failure. It monetizes it. The transfeminine isn’t hidden, she’s fed into TikTok, fashion, Twitter discourse, IKEA sharks. “Shemale” becomes both slur and porn category. She is actually made hypervisible, not as a subject or just as a warning, but as entertainment and a consumer category. And this is the precondition by which liberalism markets gendered tolerance, visibility, exploration, and so-called autonomy. This is the trans feminine ontology: a crisis managed through aesthetics, not being excluded from the gender economy but being excessively folded into it. That is what makes the queer positioning unique and distinct. In this view, I continue to suspect this isn’t a ternary system, compelling as that seems, but a monadic one (though I admit to disagreeing with you fundamentally about what gender ontologically is here.) To reiterate a critique I made before, there is one sovereign subject-form that defines the semiotic field of gender. The supposed “three” positions are not equally constituted gender-classes but are relational distortions, failures, or reactions to that central gendered subject. What appears as a ternary is, in fact, a unified symbolic machine, a singular symbolic recursion organized around a lone sovereign subject: a Monogender. Not “man” in the biological sense, but abstract Man-as-subject, the one who names, acts, formats, and owns, and the one through whom coherence, recognition, and desire are distributed. Everyone else is positioned in relation to him: as object, as failure, as symbolic residue. Power is just proximity to this subject. Not-Power is tolerable otherness, what he comfortably owns and regulates. Subaltern is the system’s collapsed output, glitch, spectacle, and the expulsion formatted as content. What we are left with is not a grid of three genders or genders-as-classes. It is a bourgeois, monogendered field with orbiting distortions, the scattered breakdowns of gender’s semiotic order altogether.
When I was reading the essay I couldn't get out of my head homeless men, mentally ill men, pacifist man, dysfunctional war veteran man. Men who have failed at what is expected of men ideologically, othered men but differently from gay men or transgender. Do they fit within subaltern, or are they glitches/failiures/etc?
I have been thinking similarly to what you say about gender about whiteness, there is the ideal white and everyone is positioned in relation to that. It occurred to me that white homeless man is a failed white man, as he does not live up to what is expected of him ideologically. I suppose a white homeless man is also a subaltern according to the theory in this essay, I don't know, I have not thoroughly thought through it yet, but I thought I would throw this out there as something to think about.
If we conceptualize this as a scattered field with a proximal center, and all other identities orbiting the Monogendered center of gravity, then their relationship in terms of gender is closer to that center relative to women or queers. That said, failure within the masculine symbolic does not necessarily place someone outside of it. A white homeless man is still formatted as a man. His social “failure” might make him pitiable, criminalized, or ignored, but not feminized. In fact, that failure can reinforce the symbolic structure by providing contrast: a failed man is still a man within the moral architecture of gender, functioning as a cautionary tale of failing to live up to masculinity rather than a counterexample. What differentiates the subaltern, I feel, isn’t only marginalization, but symbolic illegibility or contradiction within the system’s own terms, rendering its concentric field of orbit much further away. The subaltern as a collapsed subject doesn’t just fail to live up to the standard. Their profile destabilizes or threatens its coherence. This is why transfeminine people often occupy the most violently policed position, not simply failed men or failed women, but a symbolic glitch in the formatting apparatus.
I think your parallel to whiteness is great. White failure is still whiteness. It may fall short of bourgeois norms, but whiteness remains legible and structurally protected even in failure. Similarly, manhood is not evacuated by dysfunction, it’s often amplified through its own crisis.
how honored am I to have even been a little bit part of the conversations that happened to make this essay real. you continue to put into words what I know but fail to describe myself - and I am so grateful for it! I can't wait to see what comes next.
oops, forgot this is my throwaway account. it's eight!
I really loved this and gave me a lot to think about, but I really need to say now that I disagree with your answer to the why of the transphobic murder.
The system require the class, not anyone member. It doesn't matter how many are killed because new members would always appears since, as long as the structure exist, some people will fail to maintain it and would be punish for it. So the killing is a part of maintaining the system, the ultimate punishment to a given individual.
Not all of this strikes a chord in me as reflecting an intuitive understanding, but the parts that ring true resonate powerfully. This makes visceral sense in a way that Bodies That Matter gets at in a disatisftingly empty way. There is mass, momentum in this perspective. I particularly appreciate the reproductive force that is sustained by what we might feel is subversive. Power is fed by layers of digestive processes; an ecosystem, not a system of ideology that can be simply adjusted in course. Veblen articulates social forces in biological sensibility in a way that feels akin to this work.
> Rather, it feels more like a “remake” to me than a direct sequel – a “Rebuild of Evangelion” more than it is an “Iron Man 2.”
Genuinely made me chuckle. This is minor in the grand scheme of things, but I really appreciate the humor you injected into the piece. It's nerdy without being smarmy - a rarity in this day and age - and helps digest the more serious part of the text. It's a show of good craft!
Anyway, this theory is something I think has been desperately needed in queer/gender theory for aaaages. There have been attempts at similar concepts like how I saw some people on tumblr talk about "faggot as a gender" years ago, and even acknowledgement that the already existing frameworks were ill fit to serve us, like how one of tumblr user baeddel's retrospectives on the clique of the same name mentioned that they felt like they had to fit their theory into a "privilege-oppression" framework even while realizing the framework was insufficiency, but this is the first time I've seen it laid out in a longform text rather than just mentioned off-hand in a tumblr post. I think this lack is a contributing factor to what people deem "trans infighting". The main culprit is the transmisogyny, obviously, but it seems to me that even when different groups of trans people are actually trying to have good faith discussion, there's an invisible barrier preventing us from truly reaching each other. We're always trying to prove we're "really" whatever gender say we are by pointing out how alike we are to our cis counterparts, but the actual transness, the liminality of gender within which many of us operate, is forced to go unacknowledged, lest anyone get the ides trans women/men are "actually" men/women respectively, and it stifles us! Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but sometimes it feels like it's by design TBH!
I'm curious BTW, since you have some experience with plurality/systemhood, what do you think about how that experience intersects with gender? I know it's a bit beyond the scope of this article, but as someone who recently realized they're plural, I often wonder about this. It's quite common for systems to have a variety of genders among their members - it's certainly true for ours - and I always take cues from them about how they want to be referred as, but I struggle to even conceptualize how this fits into the wider structure of gender. Well, the easy answer is that it doesn't and this is due to ableism in society preventing us from even being fully acknowledged as existing beings lol, but surely not every system or even individual alter is part od the subaltern class, right? It just feels far too simplistic!
“surely not every system or even individual alter is part of the subaltern class, right?” I think this is such an interesting question! I’m a fan of the original gender ternary piece and also loved this update, but it’s still possible I’m misunderstanding, so bear with me. When the term faggotization was used in the original piece, I remember the author making effort to point out that the class one finds oneself in is imposed from the larger social system, and therefore must be legible to power, not to oneself. That when thinking about locating gender class, a possible heuristic might be to imagine how the most bigoted dude at a bar might categorize you. So does power interact with you differently based on the presenting alter? (Pardon if my terminology is incorrect— I know two systems but I’m new to the concept) Are you Subalternized by power? Can you access Not Power? Can you access Power? How does power that consistently interacts with different alters categorize you? Anyone reading, are these questions along the right lines or am I missing something?
The original was extremely enlightening to me and when paired with this does a really good job of explaining both what these ideas are and why they are so important.
I do feel with writing this theoretical and in conversation with other works really lacks references. Especially in areas like the material base where you defer to the work of others to make the case.
This is an incredible work and I absolutely loved reading it. I hope you don't mind if I use your own work as a foundational piece for a personal research project on Marxism & Queerness and just wanted to thank you for putting this piece out there.
I really like this theory of subalternisation, I've been thinking about it a lot, and as a non passing trans man I notice it in my own life. I like how it divorces gender identity from gender class, and how it shows how gender is stamped on you, it is not something you get to choose, nor is it something you can make room for your identity within. For a long time there was only the radfem approach, female and male as a class, I found it useful for a while but when applied to my experience as an out trans man, and also my longer experience before that as an autistic woman, I found it to be inadequate and broken.
Particularly as an autistic woman I found sex as class to be unsuitable, as my inability to conform to accepted femininity, in appearance and in behaviour, caused me to be what I now recognised as 'subalternised'. Even when i did my best to fit in with cis womanhood I felt that I was a lower class to my cis neurotypical girl classmates. I was often subjugated in different classes despite my grades, different areas of the school during lunch time, put in the 'mixed group' in sports (instead of girl or boy groups, we all had to stay in our respective groups, and one time when the girls were asked to leave and I didn't no one said anything as I was not considered to be a girl). A lot of this was due to my masculinity, but regardless of whether I successfully masked it or not I still ended up there.
I felt 'not like other girls', which is something I see many autistic girls consider themselves, particularly teenagers, a time when gender is being stamped onto you more than ever. This is all why I've had such a big problem with the NLOG discourse, and have learned to stay away from it, as it does not take into account autistic experience. Instead of superior we often feel inferior, and are treated as inferior to non autistic women, and often feel like 'failed women', something I often see autistic women call themselves. It is not uncommon to wish for the grace neurotypical cis women have, as we are aware that it would protect us massively.
Yes there is ableism here, and I think being disabled can be considered a gender failiure, but with autism we are unable to perform gender correctly across the board regardless of whether we are feminine or not. I was not feminine so I got a lot of abuse particularly during my education and still now in my 30s suffer from the trauma of it. However remembering my neurodivergent cis girl feminine school mates, I know that within the school we were often classed together, and I as a more extreme version of them. This would manifest in place, as we were often informally subjugated to certain rooms during lunch break, unable to go out of these unless it was to go to class because the abuse would be constant. There was a strange hierarchy in this girl group, and I and another (who I hear later identified butch) were at the bottom, and the more feminine presenting and better masking above us. We were often bullied by the group, I imagine this was the groups attempt at alieving their subalternisation by further doing the same to us. Some really had aspirations to a non autistic status that they could never achieve. It crushed them to say the least.
The abuse often centered on our role as woman (or i think better yet, Not Power, in sevice of Power), we were dirty, clumbsy, we were notorious lesbians (and 2 of the girls discovered they were). For me as a masculine person, exhibiting many 'boy' behaviours, I was not just a lesbian but an 'animal fucker', someone with sexual interest that don't involve humans, who lives as an animal (despite not exhibiting animal like behaviour, like some autistic people do) Thing-ized and dehumanised. I was even accused of being a trans woman, something I found strangely affirming as a teenager. Still these categories, lesbian, trans woman, animal, all dehumanised, not fitting into gender class. I am white, but I have a theory of failed whiteness, and I think to be animal-ized, 'savage', fits into that. I think there is an interesting intersection here, but I won't go into it now.
Another thing, I saw Dr Devon Price talk of gender class as unconscious, as mechanised. This makes sense to me. I have acquaintances who are supportive of trans people, yet I can see that they do not view me as man, and not because they do not consciously try. There is an awkwardness there. I see it in the way they talk to cis men in comparison to the way they talk to me. I'm not overly offended by it, because I recognise that this is something that I do too, and I suppose I can not choose to gender a person the way they wish to be gendered in terms of gender class, just as I can not choose how I am gendered.
Anyway, here are some thoughts I had in regards to your essay that I thought I would post, they're not very organised but perhaps your theory can help clarify them for me, or open some new paths.
How attached to gender class is aesthetics/visual symbols? Can we break this down to underlying ideology?
Are men who deny war subalternised? Pacifists forced to wear white feathers, what could be interpretted as a feminine symbol. An otherwise conventional looking man, and a feminine symbol is added to him where there is none. Is this subalternisation? Aesthetic symbol a tool for gender class?
Women who do not serve men, lesbians, are they subalternised? If they inhabit 'not power' through their visual presentation (a hollywoodized assimilated lesbian), but do not show interest in men are they subalternised, or is there disobeying of the ideological principles of gender class enough? I'm sure you get a lot of these types of questions so I apologise if this is a repetitive experience!
Holyyy fucking shit reading this made my brain cum and orgasm every fucking sentence holy shit holy shit Fuck
I will return to this and read it more in-depth later -- I'm at work right now, oops -- but I hope it is okay if I reference this/build upon it as I'm working on my own things related to gay trans men. I am always excited by explicitly Marxist analyses of gender, so I am happy to see that you built further upon your previous essay.
Hey I love this, it felt as intuitive to me as a reader as the first time I learned about the basic Marxist theory of economic class. A liberal understanding of the issue that treats the issue as one of power with a bunch of tiny little exceptions that make the whole thing impossible to fully understand instantly collapsing into legibility by reframing the terms of the class struggle. I love dialectical materialism!
I think something that could be expounded on in the future (and something I will certainly be thinking a lot about) is the idea of class assignment. It seems like a big difference between traditional understandings of class vs. gender-class is that a person's gender-class position seems socially defined whereas a person's economic class is defined, more simply, by possession of capital. No social understanding of a member of the bourgeoisie can remove their capital and therefore their class position, but can a trans man in P be removed from their class position by something as simple and commonplace as a misgendering? In other words: how do we know what gender-class somebody is in?
beautifully written oh my god
I can’t stop thinking about this since I read it. I keep wanting to simplify or just print it out as is as little physical books/zines & leave it in public places because I want everyone to read it. I feel that most people bristle at the idea that gender is something done to you instead of something you intrinsically are but that’s a necessary hurdle to overcome for capitalism to end & be replaced by something better. It just made so much sense immediately that it feels like a call to action.
I love this! I'm writing my own gender article up (mostly to make sure everything Sticks in my head) and kept on circling around and around on one question (which might be a stupid one, sorry): is this Base or Superstructure? It seems like it is mostly the latter as it is concerned for sorting based on one's individual, ideological/physical/protocol failings of gender rather than on any relations of production or labor. I know Section 3 addressed it somewhat (at least, in regards to gender-class and the nuclear family. However, unless I'm reading it wrong, even that section seems to focus on how gender-class shapes the material rather (superstructure into base) rather than the inverse.
Again, sorry if this is a stupid question. I love this piece a ton!!